


Questions and Kisses

by WorryinglyInnocent



Category: Cobra (TV 2019), Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Anyelle, F/M, Fluff, I can't believe I'm writing something before I've even seen the canon, Politics, Sutherelle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 08:10:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18406607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: Sutherelle. Principal Private Secretary Belle helps prepare a nerve-wracked new Prime Minister for his first PMQ session, and they reflect on their long-standing relationship and where it might be going.





	Questions and Kisses

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I’ve jumped on the sutherelle bandwagon! I think my interpretation is slightly different to other people’s but hey, it’s not like we’ve got any canon to work from and variety is the spice of life, right?

The first thing that Belle French heard as she walked towards the cabinet meeting room of Number 10 Downing Street was the sound of her boss losing his breakfast in the bathroom.

She paused outside the door and knocked politely.

 “Sir, are you all right?”

She was answered by a low Scottish growl telling her to go forth and multiply in no uncertain terms, and Belle just smiled.

“You know I’m not going anywhere, sir.”

The growling stopped in favour of more retching, and Belle leaned against the wall. She felt like she was going to be here for a while, but they were on a tight schedule today and needed to get a move on.

An undersecretary walked past, looked at Belle, then the locked door, and then back to Belle with a worried expression.

“Is he all right?”

Belle nodded. “I’ll get him sorted out in time, don’t worry.”

She had been sorting out Robert Sutherland ever since she had arrived at the Houses of Parliament for her first day as a private secretary, more years ago now than she cared to remember. The irascible backbencher for Glasgow North had already seen off at least three secretaries, but Belle had stood her ground and within two weeks, they were firm friends and Sutherland had begged her to stay with him for the rest of his political career.

And Belle had done so. She had been by his side as he had risen through the ranks of the ministries, finally becoming party leader and now, after a fraught general election that had come down to the wire, Prime Minister.

She was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, one of the highest ranking positions in the civil service, and she was currently trying to get the man to come out of a bathroom.

She knocked again.

“Sir, you can’t stay in there all day, much as you would like to.”

“I can if I want.”

“No, you can’t, sir.”

There was no response, and Belle sighed. She was used to Sutherland’s anxiety and the associated nausea and petulance. No one who saw him in action in the Commons would ever believe that ten minutes prior he’d been a nervous wreck receiving a pep talk from his secretary, but Belle was well-known throughout parliament as the very essence of discretion and it was joked that she kept more government secrets than MI5.

“Sir. Sir. Mr Sutherland.” She smacked the door. “Bob! If you don’t get your arse out here now, then so help me…”

The undersecretary squeaked and ran away lest the Prime Minister suddenly appear and vent his anger.

The door opened and Sutherland peered around it.

“You never call me Bob.”

“I do when I want to get you out of small spaces. Come on, let’s get you freshened up and off to make your fortune on London’s golden streets, Dick Whittington.”

“I’m Prime Minister, not Lord Mayor.”

“Well, if you want me to stop purposefully using incorrect analogies then you might want to get out here and get ready for work.”

Sutherland glared at her and disappeared back inside the bathroom. Belle heard the toilet flush and the sink gurgling, and a moment later he came out. She looked him up and down.

“Have to say it, sir, you’re not looking great right now.”

“Thanks, I’m sure you look gorgeous after you’ve spent half an hour with your head in a toilet.”

“You look like you’ve been at a rave all night.”

“I have been. The rave in my head telling me that everything’s going to go horribly wrong.”

Belle could empathise. She’d always stayed in the background, content to be part of the invisible civil service machine that kept parliament running smoothly. She’d never been the public figurehead of all those interconnected cogs like Sutherland had to be.

“Come on, sir,” she said gently. “You need to look calm, professional and completely unruffled today of all days. I’m not letting you walk into that chamber looking like you do now. Did you shave this morning?”

Sutherland shook his head and held up a quivering hand. “I thought that scruffy would look better than missing an ear.”

Belle corralled him towards the stairs up to the Prime Minister’s private apartment, despite his protests that they had to leave in ten minutes. They weren’t very strong protests, probably because Belle knew that he didn’t particularly want to leave the safety of Downing Street to brave the House of Commons, but he had to keep up appearances.

She pushed him into the bathroom.

“Shirt off.”

“Are you propositioning me, Miss French?”

“Of course, sir, it has absolutely nothing to do with me not wanting to get shaving foam on your shirt.” She had already located all the various tools she required, and she was wondering if she really ought to know so much about her boss’s private life. On reflection though, he didn’t really have all that many others who knew him as well as she did. He had no family to speak of. He’d had a wife who’d left him on the same day he’d been appointed shadow Defence Secretary, and Belle hadn’t seen her since.

It had been Belle who’d listened to all his speeches as he practised them in front of the mirror in his office. It had been Belle who’d kept refilling his coffee when he’d been working on a draft bill that had to pass or else he’d be a laughing stock within his own party. It had been Belle who’d gone up to his Glasgow constituency with him and argued with his campaign manager until she was blue in the face, defending his corner and always getting her way like the force of nature Sutherland had always described her as.

It had been Belle who’d stayed up all night with him during the general election, watching the results roll in and watching the seats gradually change colour in their favour until the majority was there, slim but undeniable.

It had been Belle he’d hugged in joy at their victory, and Belle who’d hoped that he’d never let go of her.

She knew that it was a cliché, bosses falling for their secretaries and vice versa, especially when it came to politicians. She knew that if anything were to happen between them, then the press would have a field day speculating if a torrid affair with Belle was the reason for Sutherland’s divorce seven years ago.

She knew all that, and yet she still couldn’t help wanting it. For all he was her boss, he’d also become her closest friend and confidante; their relationship went both ways. The level of trust between them was such that she was now shaving his face in readiness for the first Prime Minister’s Questions session of the new government.

“I can’t do this,” Sutherland muttered as Belle finished up and he wiped off the cream.

“What can’t you do, sir?”

“PMQ’s.”

“You’ve done hundreds of PMQ’s sessions in your time, Mr Sutherland. I seem to remember one spectacular occasion whilst you were still a backbencher that got you a standing ovation from half the house. Including from the opposite party. The speaker nearly had a heart attack.”

“I know that! I’ve never done PMQ’s when I’ve been the PM before! It’s very different when you’re the one being bombarded with questions instead of the one doing the bombarding.”

“We’ve already drafted all your answers; you’re going to be fine.”

“I know that!”

“Also, I hate to be the one to state the obvious, but you were the one who wanted to be Prime Minister.”

“I know that!” Sutherland sighed, attempting to retie his tie for the fourth time before giving up and letting Belle do it. “Will you be there?”

“No, sir, I’ll be in your office dealing with your fan mail.”

“I don’t have any fan mail.”

“In that case, I’ll be in your office dealing with your hate mail.”

Sutherland scowled at her, and Belle gave him a benign smile as her phone chirruped.

“Car’s outside. Time to knock ‘em dead.”

X

As soon as he stepped into the chamber and took his place behind the despatch box, Sutherland’s nausea subsided. This was his home, after all. He’d been a politician for over twenty-five years, and the Houses of Parliament were more familiar to him than his own house in Scotland.

As the questions got underway, he relaxed further. Being on the other side of the chamber wasn’t so different after all. He glanced up at the gallery and almost had to double take when he saw Belle sitting there, grinning down at him. Of course she was there. She’d always been there when he needed her. When they had started out in the Commons, they were both practically alone in the quagmire of British politics; was it any wonder that they’d become such close friends and allies over the course of their careers?

Something pulled painfully in his heart. Belle had so much potential within the civil service, and he’d selfishly kept her with him instead of letting her spread her wings and move up into the upper echelons of top government departments. She could have been running the show by now. As it was, she was just running him. By dint of being his private secretary and answering directly to the Prime Minister, she ranked extremely highly in the service, but he couldn’t help thinking that she could have moved higher if he had let her go, rather than tying her career to his so closely.

She’d never expressed any desire to move on from him; she’d always seemed happy enough to stay by his side, but then again, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever actually asked her outright about her career plans.

By the time the session was over, his colleagues were congratulating him on a very successful first PMQ’s, Sutherland was beginning to wonder why he’d been worried in the first place, which was generally always his reaction after some important event that Belle had found him throwing up before. He was smiling as he made his way back to the Prime Minister’s office to find Belle waiting for him.

“I don’t know how you always manage to get to my office before I do, even if you’ve been at the other end of the building,” he said. “I’m beginning to think that the civil service has secret passages through the walls.”

“No, we’ve just mastered the art of teleportation,” Belle replied blithely. She smiled, hoping off her desk where she’d been perched and coming over to hug him.

“I told you it would be all right.”

“I know you did.” He didn’t want to let go. He felt safe in Belle’s arms. He always had done. Belle didn’t seem to be making any move to pull away, and he looked at her.

Her lips were so plump and kissable, her lipstick worn away where she’d been biting her lip, as nervous as he was in her own way, but far better at hiding it until after the fact. Her eyes were so very blue, and searching his face for something, anything, to tell her what she ought to do next.

Sutherland took the initiative, pressing his lips against hers and pulling her in close.

Belle melted against him, her hands coming up to run through his hair. Kissing her just felt so _right_ , and he wondered why they hadn’t done it before. At least he didn’t feel as much guilt about keeping her with him now. She evidently wanted to be here just as much as he wanted her to be here.

She broke away, licking her lips, her eyes bright.

“That was…” Sutherland began. “Well, that was… Wow.”

“I quite agree, sir.”

“We’re kissing, please don’t call me sir.”

“As you wish.” Her smile was cheeky. “But you’ve always been sir to me. It’s ceased to have any connotations of authority and now it’s just a term of endearment. Sir.”

Sutherland kissed her again in an attempt to shut her up, but she pulled away, a giggle threatening to break free with every word that she spoke.

“Don’t forget that you’ve got the introductory meeting with the green belt protection committee at DEFRA at three. And then there’s…”

She tailed off under another kiss.

“Just let me enjoy this moment, Belle,” Sutherland pleaded. “I’ve been wanting to do that for God only knows how long.”

“I’ve been wanting you to do that for just as long. Maybe longer.” She gave a contented sigh, resting her head against his shoulder. “What happens now?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

The thought of it didn’t worry him as much as he thought it perhaps ought to have done. Considering the amount of things he could panic about when left alone with just his own thoughts for company, he wasn’t panicking about this at all. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that this was Belle, and no matter what happened, Belle had always been there for him and had always told him that everything was going to be all right. Whenever Belle was around, Sutherland knew that everything would work out in the end, and even if it didn’t work out, then she would be there to help him pick up the pieces.

There were a lot of things that could go horribly wrong, and he had always been one to look for the clouds behind the silver linings. In his experience, it was best to prepare for the worst and that way, everything else that happened would be a nice surprise. Belle had often expressed incredulity at how someone as pessimistic and highly strung as he was had managed to become a major public figure whom, the polls kept saying, the voters actually trusted to bring them into a brighter future.

He’d always joked that he saved up his optimism for putting on show to the public so Belle only ever saw his more misanthropic side. She constantly saw him at his worst. Hell, just this morning she’d had to practically drag him out of the bathroom. Yet she was still here, still wanted to be here, content in his embrace. Part of him kept thinking that maybe this was all a very well-choreographed dream and he’d wake up back in Downing Street in a minute.

“I’d ask you out to dinner but I don’t think that it would be all that romantic an occasion,” he said.

Belle laughed. “Yes, what with secret service bodyguards and journalists looking for a scoop, I don’t think that it would be very intimate, and I’ve been working here long enough to know that the food in the House is absolutely atrocious. Dinner would be lovely, though.”

They both knew what she was suggesting, and it made sense. After all, Belle spent so much time in Downing Street that it was a second home to her; Sutherland had only been moved in for less than a month and Belle was already keeping a change of clothes in her office for when they’d been working so late she didn’t want to go home. The Downing Street Chief of Staff hadn’t been entirely in jest when he’d suggested setting up a camp-bed for her under the cabinet meeting table.

“There’s no vote tonight, so we should be able to get back fairly swiftly,” Sutherland agreed. “And if the worst comes to the worst, we can order in. I’m sure that it would make someone’s day, delivering to Downing Street. I could make someone famous as the person who delivered the Prime Minister’s pizza.”

Belle snorted, her shoulders shaking as she tried to muffle her laughter. Finally she composed herself and looked up at him.

“At any rate, we need to celebrate today’s success,” she said. “One session down, and hopefully several more to go.”

“Will you be there for them?”

Belle smiled, and went up on her tiptoes to kiss him again, firmly and deliberately.

“Of course I will.”

Even if their fledgling relationship didn’t go the distance, Sutherland knew that he could rely on Belle to have his back whatever the world of politics might throw at him.

There was a timid knock on the office door, and it briefly occurred to him that he had work to do and he probably ought to stop kissing Belle and get on with running the country, but he wanted to enjoy the moment for just a little while longer.

“Erm, Prime Minister… Oh.”

The door closed again as soon as it had opened, and Sutherland wondered if he’d succeeded in scarring an intern for life on their first day on the job, before deciding that it was a risk he was willing to take.

The country could wait a little while longer.

 


End file.
